How can I use the bump node and wave texture node to create ridged spirals around a vase?
It looks to me like the big thing is that the strength of the bump map is too high; with Strength set to 1, it's trying to treat the bumps as having a maximum height of 1, which is very large compared to the size of your base. Try greatly reducing the bump map's Strength; maybe 0.1 or 0.05.
Also, note that a bump map will always produce &quot;flat&quot; ridges - bump maps use normal-vector trickery to produce the illusion of geometry, but when viewed from this close you'll always be able to see that the bumps aren't real. It may be better to use the &quot;Displacement&quot; option on that far-right node (attach a &quot;Vector Displacement&quot; node, and put your height map into that) combined with the &quot;Displacement and Bump&quot; or &quot;Displacement Only&quot; option in the material, with a subsurf modifier to supply some extra geometry. Displacement will actually move vertices, so it'll make ridges that actually look real.